On a cool, crisp Saturday in October 1962, shortly after the first tanks and trucks full of soldiers rolled through Orlando headed for Key West, my family piled in Daddy's '53 Ford (so there would be no mistaking us as moneyed) and drove out Highway 50 West to visit the half-dozen bomb-and-fallout-shelter sales shacks that appeared almost overnight during the Cuban missile crisis. So sure were my parents that we would go to war with Russia that construction began the following week on what would become the focal point of our back yard.
Daddy had been enamored of a cavelike underground model but my mother, who was writing the check, chose from among the above-ground samples, deciding, I suppose, that if the nuclear hit was not direct, a fallout shelter was all we would need.
I remember the construction clearly because the hole the workmen dug for the foundation was deep enough to fill with water every night and, until the floor was poured, was the closest we ever came to having a pool. There were paired concrete-block walls - interior and exterior - with a 3-foot space between them, which they filled with sand. After the interior ceiling was poured - 3 feet below the top of the walls - this, too, was filled to the brim with dirt. Within a month, weeds took hold.
On the inside, four cots were bolted to the wall but could be raised or lowered as needs dictated. There was a small sink, a hand pump for water and a silly, filterless, hand-operated air pump. The shelves at one end were soon lined with water jugs and canned food. I have no recollection of a toilet or a cook-stove. Even before Khrushchev backed down and removed the missiles, the shelter had become a recognizable mistake. The effort to complete the preparations lost momentum and petered out.
As the Cold War years trickled by, my parents took to quietly sparring over the ultimate possession of the shelter. My father painted this eyesore the same beige color as our house, which was also concrete block. Momma had him repaint the steel door turquoise, her favorite color, and she had the yard man plant an ixora hedge along the side that people could glimpse from the road. In the narrow space near the foot of the cots, she had bookshelves built and filled them with a growing collection of Reader's Digest condensed books. My father installed an air conditioner above the steel door to cut down on the mold and dampness in the summer.
Daddy, a lifelong hunter and fisherman, suffered in Florida's heat. He purchased bulletmaking equipment and spent hours shut inside the shelter with the air conditioner running. Momma, who controlled the finances in our family after Daddy's cypress-knee lampmaking business failed, folded up the bunks and began to stack boxes of old bank statements and tax records against the wall.
Soon Daddy's boxes of new bullets, jars of gunpowder, wad cutters and empty shell casings crowded out the rusting cans of food and swollen, rock-hard boxes of powdered milk.
My mother lowered the two bottom bunks and began to fill them with boxes of old clothes and shoes that should have gone to Goodwill. Piles of magazines accumulated: National Geographic, Life, Look, and Saturday Evening Post.
Daddy bolted a long 2-by-4 to the wall opposite the bunks and nailed jars full of bulletmaking paraphernalia by their lids to the board. Momma lowered and began to fill the top bunks.
Then one day Daddy came home with a trunk full of fertilizer, seed packets, onion starts and assorted garden tools. He leaned a ladder against the east side of the shelter, climbed up, pulled all the weeds and planted a garden. He bought an extra-long garden hose. He placed a beach chair in the shade of a palm tree with a leftover concrete block for a drink stand. At night after work at the job he'd found selling business forms, he fixed a pitcher of martinis and climbed the ladder to weed. When it got dark, he'd disconnect the hose from the sprinkler head, sit wrapped in the buggy glow of the backyard light and move just his arm from side to side, gently watering his garden.
His predinner cocktail hour habitually lasted until very late, and it became his habit, as his garden matured, to harvest a little something to accompany whatever Momma had left warming on the stove.
My mother's bedroom had a door that opened onto the back yard. Late each night, when she heard Daddy head out to the shelter, she would open her door and stand behind the screen with a flashlight trained on him as he climbed the ladder with his spade. When he made his selection, he'd come boldly to the edge of the roof and hold his prize up in Momma's light.
I hated my father's drinking then, but have often wondered since if Daddy wasn't driven up there by my mother's bank statements only to find that his garden was his success. He stood there at night, bathed in my mother's angry light, surrounded by his tomatoes, hot peppers, green onions, cucumbers and carrots. When he felt his stomach rumble with hunger, he could bend and select a few things to take at least that pain away.
-Ginny Rorby, who was raised in Winter Park, lives in Northern California and is co-director of the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference.
